I glance around, aiming my next question at Brogan, even though he’s a dog. At least he’s not an annoyingly arrogant reaper with a stick up his butt.
“So where are we? And how the hell did you get me here?”
“This is our place,” Brogan replies, wagging his tail again, so it thwacks against my leg.
“Your place?”
“As a reaper, one of my abilities is that I can draw a soul along with me. That’s what I did with you.”
He looks kind of sheepish about it. He even has the gall toblush,the butthead. So I find I can’t even be mad about him manhandling my soul without asking.
“Hold up, what do you mean ‘as a reaper’?” I’m pretty sure he said that previously, but I just glossed over it.
“I’m a soul reaper. Brogan is my trusty hound.”—Once again that earns him a disgruntled, growly snort from the hound himself.
“So, you—”
“We collect the souls of those ready to pass on and we help them move on to the afterlife. I reap the souls, along with Brogan.”
Holy meatballs.
“You’re a Grim Reaper.”
He winces slightly. “We prefer the term ‘soul reaper’.”
“Okay, Mr. Soul Reaper. Now, are you going to tell me what I’m doing here?”
Two confused cornflower blue eyes meet mine for a beat. “I told you, a weaver is missing. Our fate weaver here in the garden, Wren, she disappeared a few days ago. Madame LaFontaine told me she had already contacted you for your help in finding her.”
Ah,that.The message on my phone last night from Madame LaFontaine, headmistress of the weaver academy. The message I had listened to a half dozen times before shoving my phone at the other end of the room and then drinking half a bottle of wine.
“I never agreed to help,” I tell him quickly. “Madame left me a message, but it’s not like I agreed to anything.”
He hums. “That explains why you’re so prickly about being here.”
Prickly? This guy rocks up, snatches me out of my kitchen before I can even have a sip of coffee and then tells me I’m prickly?
I snort just as the talking dog makes a little chuffing sound almost like a sneeze, kind of like he’s laughing at this guy’s ridiculousness, too.
“She might have been more receptive if you’d asked before you grabbed her, doofus,” that same deep voice that apparently belongs to the dog says in my head.
“Well, I was led to believe that you’d be helping with finding Wren. I assume you have some experience of finding missing people or something? Madame LaFontaine wasn’t overly generous with the details of you she shared,” Soren says.
Nope. Unless you countbeinga missing person, although I knew where I was the whole time I’ve been gone.
I’d guess that Madame is assuming that the whole world-hopping thing will come in handy with their search, and that she has something over me, so I’m likely to help them.
Or maybe she just thinks that all weavers think alike and I’m the easiest pickings, the one without an official placement. It’s not like I’m trying to run a business while trying to stay off the higher-ups radar or anything.
Although now that they have my phone number… and my current address, I’m guessing all that is probably over.
“Nope,” I tell Soren brightly. “I have zero experience finding missing people.”
Maybe if I put him off and convince him I’ll be more of a hindrance than a help, he’ll let me go home.
To a hungover Jet, to organize yet another tour that I no longer want to run.
Or… maybe I can do something different.
